Virginia Roots Music: Creating and Conserving Tradition

In the two decades before World War II, folklorists and recording companies collected and recorded Virginia music that formed the bedrock of the country, blues, and gospel music traditions that exist today. Both the collectors and the recorders responded to fundamental changes in the economy, technology, and society of America and the South as phonographs and radio began to spread traditional musical forms to a wider audience. Early folklorists feared that radio and records would dilute the “pure” music of the American “folk” and determined to document and preserve these musical traditions before their inevitable demise. Record companies and radio stations, on the other hand, began searching out “old-time” and “race” artists to feed a growing commercial audience. Eagerly selling the music through new technology, they also marketed the songs and musicians as an expression of a more-authentic American past.

Before the advent of sound recordings late in the nineteenth century, traditional music was documented in manuscript or printed forms. Music publishers printed piano arrangements of traditional American and British tunes to play in drawing rooms and parlors in middle-class homes. Published tune books documented the religious music sung in congregations across Virginia and the South. Publishers also recorded the songs of America’s first indigenous musical theater—minstrelsy—which was itself partially based on the “collecting” of African American music in the South and Virginia.

The first systematic collecting of traditional music forms in Virginia by researchers began late in the nineteenth century. The most important of these collecting efforts focused on Anglo-American balladry and African American folksongs, especially the spirituals of enslaved people. One of the first Black spirituals to be published—”Let My People Go,” sometimes referred to as “Go Down Moses”—was collected from escaped enslaved workers who gathered at Fort Monroe in Hampton, which was under control of the Union army in 1861. African American schools founded after emancipation such as Fisk University and Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (Hampton University) developed singing groups to raise funds through northern and European tours. Both sought to counter the racist images of African Americans found in minstrel shows. Black folklorists and composers researched songs from enslaved people as a vital cultural and artistic expression of African American life.

Two of the earliest collecting groups in Virginia were the Hampton Folk-Lore Society (founded 1893) and the Virginia Folk-Lore Society (founded in 1913). Alice Mabel Bacon, a teacher at Hampton Institute, established the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, and most of the society’s members and collectors were students, graduates, and teachers at the institution, whom Bacon trained as folklorists. The work of the society became a popular feature of the institute’s publication, the Southern Workman.

One of the earliest state folklore societies in the United States, the Virginia Folk-Lore Society focused its early collecting on ballads as defined by Francis James Child in his five-volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). The society’s archivist, Arthur Kyle Davis (1897–1972) edited and published fifty-one ballads, songs that told a story, gathered under the auspices of the society in Traditional Ballads of Virginia. He also included versions of songs collected by Englishman Cecil J. Sharp, who traveled through Appalachia in 1917 and later published a collection with pioneer ballad-hunter Olive Dame Campbell. Folklorists regarded the Appalachian region as a prime area for collecting ballads in America, because they assumed that the isolation of the mountains had preserved the culture and songs of the British emigrants.

The invention of the phonograph ushered in a new era in distributing and experiencing musical performance. Commercial sound recordings captured classical and popular music for a broad audience.

Victor, Columbia, OKeh, and other major recording companies held recording sessions across the South and expanded their offerings in jazz, blues, and old-time. Consumers could purchase “talking machines” and phonograph records at music stores, piano companies, and furniture dealers. Catalog sales and traveling salesmen fueled rural demand. Local musicians learned tunes from the discs, receiving new songs from artists they had never met. As recording devices became widely available, cheaper, and more portable, folklorists and musicologists made their own sound recordings throughout the South. Although the Great Depression of the 1930s limited the number of new artists who recorded for the commercial labels, researchers expanded their work under New Deal relief programs. The Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk-Song was particularly active in recording blues, gospel, and old-time music in Virginia.

Beginning in 1932, Arthur Kyle Davis, of the Virginia Folk-Lore Society, recorded 325 aluminum discs of folksongs and ballads. These recordings, made possible by a $1,000 grant to Davis and the society from the American Council of Learned Societies, are among the earliest field recordings of Anglo-American folksong extant in this country. From 1937 to 1942, Professor Roscoe Lewis, of Hampton Institute, and members of the Negro Studies Project of the Virginia Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration, made approximately 200 recordings in and around Hampton, Newport News, and Petersburg.

Although many of the recordings were narratives and stories told by former enslaved people, Lewis and his group captured quartets, choirs, blues singers, and former enslaved workers singing in groups and individually. In 1936 John Lomax and Harold Spivacke went to the Virginia State Penitentiary and Virginia State Prison Farm to record music. The two men made discs of work songs, spirituals, minstrel tunes, and blues sung by prisoners, including Jimmie Strother and Joe Lee, that they thought were uncorrupted by commercial influences. Other Library of Congress researchers, such as Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, and a young Pete Seeger, visited southwestern Virginia to record musicians, some of whom had already made records for commercial labels. The majority of musicians, however, stood before a microphone for the first time.

In 1927 the Victor label advertised auditions in Bristol, which straddles the Virginia-Tennessee line. Usually remembered today for capturing the first commercial recordings of soon-to-be stars Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family (A. P. Carter, Maybelle Carter, Sara Carter), the recording sessions and Bristol have been called the “Birthplace of Country Music.” In fact, many Virginia old-time artists had already successfully recorded by 1927, including Henry Whitter and the Stoneman Family, both of whom were present at the Bristol session. The city hosted another Victor recording session in 1928.

For five days in October 1929, musicians from across Virginia played their songs for engineers of the Okeh Record Company in Richmond. Firms like Victor, Columbia, and Okeh held sessions away from their northern studios in order to mine the rich vein of southern music demanded by record buyers. The Richmond recording session was a microcosm of Virginia and American music, capturing the work of old-time bands, gospel quartets, harmonica players, jazz acts, and even Hawaiian orchestras. Artists came from Roanoke, Richmond, Hopewell, Norfolk, and several rural communities hoping to achieve musical fame. A few had already made 78-rpm records, most notably Bela Lam and His Greene County Singers, the Sparkling Four Quartet, the Tubize Royal Hawaiians, and the Richmond Starlight Quartette. Others had been heard on the new technology of radio.

The emergence of commercial radio in the 1920s played a major role in the expansion of popular and traditional music across America. With the advent of radio, local artists were heard across the country. In Virginia, WDBJ in Roanoke and WRVA in Richmond aired many roots music performers. The ability to be heard on radio also influenced the scouting by record companies. OKeh Records chose most, if not all, of the musicians for the Richmond 1929 session before the event, in part because they were already known to company officials through radio.

Early broadcasts on Richmond radio station WRVA, founded in 1925 by the Larus and Brother Tobacco Company, featured such local performers as fiddler Babe Spangler, the Dixie Spiritual Singers, and the Tubize Royal Hawaiian Orchestra. By the 1930s, the station’s main traditional music show was the Corn Cob Pipe Club. The show owed as much to vaudeville as to traditional Virginia culture, incorporating an orchestrated patter of jokes, popular and traditional songs, and even a minstrel duo patterned after the Amos and Andy show, which also aired over WRVA.

The musicians’ choice of material often confounded the categories that record executives, folklorists, and musicologists tried to place on them. “Old-time” musicians played traditional and popular songs, often performing different material for folklorists and commercial outfits. Many white musicians also learned and performed music—jazz and blues—that record companies marketed as “race” music to African American audiences. The development of railroads and coal-mining in Southwest Virginia brought African Americans to the region and resulted in an intersection of Black and white musical styles. Not only did Black musicians directly influence country pioneers such as the Carter Family, but African American artists such as Carl Martin also played in and recorded with all-Black string bands. White artists in the area reciprocated by learning and recording blues songs. Ironically, the banjo, an instrument played by Black musicians and a small number of minstrel performers before the Civil War, became a “cross-over” instrument afterward and is today almost universally associated with white country, bluegrass, or old-time artists.

The sound of keening voices, banjos, fiddles, and guitars emanating from the Appalachian region fascinated Americans early in the 1900s and tantalized record executives when they suspected its commercial potential. The instrumentation and distinctive vocals seem to have defined the music as ancient as did the rural backgrounds of many of the songsters. Certainly, these artists drew on local traditions and tunes, but there were also distinctly modern and commercial elements to their presentations. The music that was popularly called “Old Time” in the 1920s and 1930s had many sources, including traditional Anglo-American balladry, British and American airs and fiddle tunes, religious harmony singing, antebellum minstrelsy, and popular song. Moreover, performers began writing pieces with an “Old Time” sound, from topical songs on famous events such as “The Wreck on the Southern Old 97” to “country” remakes of blues and jazz numbers.

White Top Folk Festival was one of four major folk festivals founded within a decade in the Southeast after 1928. On August 15, 1931, several thousand people attended the first White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County. Organized by John A. Blakemore, a wealthy businessmen in the Abingdon area, Annabel Morris Buchanan, a folklorist, and John Powell, a world-renowned classical pianist and white supremacist who co-founded the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, the festival consisted mainly of instrumental and singing contests with some recreational dancing. The next year, the festival expanded to two days of performances, craft exhibitions, and a conference to celebrate all aspects of Appalachian mountain culture. In 1935 more than 10,000 people attended the festival to watch and hear more than 300 performers. There was no festival in 1937, and the final two years drew small crowds. The festival was held for the last time in 1939.

Powell and Buchanan envisioned the White Top festival as a means to assert the authenticity of British-American culture. Performers were limited to approved music in an attempt to root out any commercial influences. In 1934 one reviewer noted that some 200 bands were eliminated from competition “by reason of their evident leaning toward what radio listeners now know as hill-billy music, in which the folk tradition is caricatured.” African American performers were not allowed to participate.

Industrialization and the growth of large, modern corporations coincided with the growth of roots music styles. Large businesses often sponsored social clubs, sports teams, and musical groups that performed at company functions and frequently represented their employers at community events. Richmond’s Larus and Brother Tobacco Company featured a vocal group from the factory known as the Dixie Spiritual Singers, and the Norfolk and Western Railroad sponsored the Imperial Quartette, a Black gospel unit made up of workers, as well as the Sheet Iron and Pipe Shop String Orchestra. Many of the workers in Virginia’s mines and factories were rural people who brought their music with them, and many notable musicians formed bands in the mill villages and towns that dotted the landscape.

The development of old-time, blues, and other roots music forms occurred in a rapidly changing, modernizing world. The alienation of industrial work and town and city life may have increased the yearning for traditional music, but exposure to a wider world also broadened the musical tastes of many a Virginian. Hopewell’s Tubize Artificial Silk Company, a Belgian-based rayon manufacturer, sponsored several bands including the Tubize Royal Hawaiian Orchestra. Influenced by popular Hawaiian musicians such as Sol Hoopii and King Bennie Nawahi who had already integrated jazz, blues, and popular elements into their repertoire, the Tubize group recorded for OKeh Records in 1929 and played on WRVA into the 1930s. The band members adopted what was one of the first examples of “world music.”

Rising from the Mississippi Delta region, blues music was quickly integrated into African American musicians’ existing repertoire of rags, dance tunes, ballads, religious music, and popular songs. By the early 1920s the fusion of these influences created the so-called East Coast or Piedmont style characterized by a highly syncopated guitar technique. Songsters, musicians who could play a variety of tunes and styles, usually played guitar on their recordings. They found ready audiences at rural house parties, mining and lumber camps, city street corners, factory exits, and town dancehalls.

Born in Georgia, William “Bill” Moore was a barber and farmer in Tappahannock, although he also worked across the Rappahannock River in Warsaw in Richmond County. “Old Country Rock” demonstrates Moore’s fine playing as the singer implores family members and fellow dancers to “rock.” Steve Tarter and Harry Gay, from Scott County in Southwest Virginia, used classic blues lyrics and the 12-bar structure in their 1928 recordings for Victor, but the duo’s highly syncopated and interlocking two-guitar arrangement reveals the influence of ragtime and string-band music.

The African American vocal quartet—four Black males singing religious songs in a lead-tenor-baritone-bass harmony arrangement without instrumental accompaniment—is one of the great musical traditions in Virginia music and had strong roots in the Tidewater region. Quartets, such as the Hampton Institute Quartette, drew on the spirituals and other sacred songs prevalent during slavery. Local groups often performed in a church setting, and early quartets usually delivered their songs in a restrained, slow-meter style with great power. Social and commercial influences began to affect some of the groups’ style and material in the 1920s. Gospel-style music brought to prominence new musical material that centered on upbeat, pop-oriented ensemble arrangements and lyrics of personal salvation. A market for secular performances also existed among the record-buying public. Religious quartets lucky enough to enter the studio were sometimes pressured to record secular songs by companies seeking to get the most sales from their talent. Other groups actively toured with traveling shows and on vaudeville circuits, performing secular material influenced by ragtime and jazz. Many groups used different names when recording religious and secular material. The Norfolk Jazz Quartet performed upbeat, popular songs but called themselves the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet when recording sacred material. Other prominent Virginia groups included the Golden Gate Quartet and the Golden Crown Quartet.